So I finished reading Samuel Clemens this week and I especially enjoyed' "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." I really like stories like this one that give a little moral at the end and yet don't turn out anything like what you would have expected. I won't spoil the story for anyone who chooses to read it but I will say that it goes to show what a guilty heart can do to a person. I have to say that I had never really read much of Clemens stuff other than the Huck Finn standards and I think that I became a new fan now that I've read his other work. I also really liked "The War Prayer" and the message it was conveying. Clemens is a great story teller, able to draw you into his stories and make you hang on every word, and they have such great endings. A little moral truth to give you food for thought. I'm going to have to add some of his other stuff to my reading "wish" list.



I also read "Daisy Miller" and "The Art of Fiction" and I am now a Henry James fan. I found Daisy to be a free spirit who spit in the eye of convention to the dismay of "society". I was a little let down at the end because it wasn't exactly a happy ending which I'm a sucker for...but it had it's own sense of morality. I think James was trying to show Mr. Winterbourne as a guy who realized too late that this socially unconventional girl just wanted his attentions and he should have stopped caring about what everyone else thought and just be with her. I could be wrong on my interpretation because it was, or seemed, like an abrupt end to the story. If anyone sees it differently I welcome your thoughts.

The Greatest Love

I remember the day I first met him. I was still reeling from losing someone I loved very much. My emotions were raw and I was numb with disbelief. I imagine this is how most people feel when someone dies, but I don’t really know, I did know that my life would never be the same again. So much had changed now that he was gone, I would never again feel so loved and accepted by anyone. My best friend in the world was gone from this place; never will I see his face or hear his voice. To be in his presence was to feel calm and complete. I can remember we used to take these incredible walks on Sunday afternoons. He would pick me up in his old pickup and I would run out to jump in, excited to go on another adventure. He would let me shift the gears on the impossibly long stick shift and after a few grinding attempts I would find it and lock it into place. Once at our destination, we would grab our old gnarled walking sticks out of the back of the truck and make our way along the seemingly unexplored trail. It would be a beautiful summer day; at least that is how I always see it when I think back on it now. The sun would shine down and warm our backs as we traveled slowly along the trail. We walk side by side, at first not saying a word, wrapped in a comfortable silence. The soothing sounds of the outdoors, the scurrying creatures of the woods running from our footsteps, the trees swaying on the light breeze. We walk along on this glorious day and little by little we begin to talk. I tell him everything that’s gone on in my little world over the past week, running on and on. He does not stop me; he just listens to every word. He hears me like no one else can or will. When my talk winds down he tells me things about his life. There is so much to know, his life has been so rich and his experiences so vast. I want to know every part of it, hear about everything, and picture it in my mind. I ask questions, so many questions, and he patiently answers them all. When we come to the clearing on the mountain side we brush off the two flat rocks that we made into our chairs on our first trip to this place. He reaches into his pants pocket and hands me out his small pocket knife, the one that’s my favorite. I begin to whittle the handle of my walking stick while he pulls out his special camera with the long lens. He takes pictures of the river way down below us, the boats like specks on the water. I’m busy with my knife as we sit and enjoy the serenity of this place, the sweat on our backs drying in the sun. All too soon we have to pack up our things and head back down the trail, we have dinner waiting for us at home and we can’t be late. Those days are bittersweet in my thoughts, I miss them now more than anything, and I wish I had appreciated them more at the time. I guess that happens when you’re just a kid and life seems like it will always stay the same, that things will never shift and the people we love will always be there.

I sat there that day, the day I met him, thinking about these things as the tears slid down my cheeks. I looked into those little eyes and felt his small heartbeat beneath my hands. I am so happy for this gift but yet so terribly sad that he couldn’t be here to see him. I had dreamed about this moment, always with him here, watching him hold my precious son and rocking him gently in the old worn recliner. It is at this moment that I look up to the ceiling of my sterile little hospital room and begin to pray. “My dear Grandpa, please look out for my little baby boy. Walk beside him as you walked beside me; whisper those same stories into his ear. Tell him all the important things about life as you told them to me...all those years ago.”

Emily Dickinson...Finally

What were your first impressions of Dickinson?

My first impressions of Dickinson were that she was obviously talented but I didn't really enjoy a lot of her subject matter. She has a lot of nature involved in her poems and repeats a lot of the same words and I have a hard time getting into it. I felt like it was best read out loud so that I could really hear the words to appreciate it. This worked much better and I did find a few that were my favorites..."I'm Nobody!, I felt A Funeral In My Brain," etc.

Have your impressions changed as you’ve studied and reread her poems this semester? If so, how? Why?

My first impression did change as we've gone on and talked more in depth about her and her life. I felt the day that Heather read a few of her lines...that was pretty intense...and very moving. I also found that as I tried to write some things in her style, I could appreciate more of her work, especially trying to incorporate some of her words into my own writing was a challenge. However, I think using her words made what I wrote much more beautiful...at least to me.

What were the dilemmas of Dickinson’s life? How do these dilemmas manifest themselves in her writing?

I believe the biggest dilemmas of Dickinson's life were her unrequieted love for Susan Gilbert Dickinson and her role as a women in the time she lived. She was really intelligent and I can only imagine how stifling it was to live in that period where a woman barely had the right to be heard, let alone write. Her writing has a lot of moments of unfulfilled love and loss and you get a sense of her struggling with this feeling of frustration to be heard.

After reviewing Dickinson’s work, make a list of words that are particularly Dickinsonian.

Celestial, Vesuvian, Dwell, Thee, Ascended, Sea, Death, A Stone, Hands, Face, Dew, Earth, Harvest, Sun, Moon, Stars, Beckons, Immense, Divine, Infinite, Soul.....

Photo Contest

A: Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, William Shakespeare, Joyce Carol Oates, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway

**Of all these authors I would still like to read some Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf - I haven't really read much of any of them. If there are any others above that anyone would recommend let me know...I am open to suggestions.

Kate Chopin/African Folktales/Clemens

I will begin with the short story by Kate Chopin "Désirée's Baby," I really enjoyed this tragedy with the unexpected twist at the end. I like the way she alludes to the baby being black when the mother visits, but the girl doesn't see it. She is blissfully unaware, in love with her husband and child, not seeing what is before her. As I was reading I was thinking the obvious, that the girl must be of black heritage. I am disliking her husband for falling out of love with her for this, petty little racist that he is. Poor Désirée is so heartbroken when finally facing the truth, or what she believes is the truth, she takes her baby and disappears into the swamp. Probably killing herself and her child, the optimist in me would like to think she wandered to her mothers but that would in a way make the story a little less compelling. How rewarding to find out at the end that it was the husband who was really the son of a slave. Sad though that his mother and father were not around for his upbringing and he turned out to be such a lout. It seems to me that two such parents who were so forward thinking would not leave their son in the racist south to become a terrible plantation owner who treated his slaves horribly. However, it made for a really good story anyway.

Next I read the African Folktales and enjoyed the story telling of each of the short stories. You can see how the language progresses from early slavery as very crude and a bit hard to read to a dialect that is a little easier to understand. I'm wondering if this was because many of the early stories had to be done in the oral tradition due to the inability for the slaves to be educated? I also noticed that many of the stories are similar in that they are most often about trickery at the expense of the "Master" or they show the "Master" as the foolish character. You can also see the culture of superstition heavily in the work like in "Talking Bones" and "Old Boss Wants into Heaven" where there is the strong belief in ghosts depicted. The writing also portrays many of the negative and racist beliefs of the white people of that time as well. Reading these stories are like stepping back in time to the attitudes of the south and their way of life.

Another story that I felt appropriate for this section was "A True Story" by Samuel Clemens. I liked the part of the title that says "Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" stating that this is a story that is told in the oral tradition. This is a story about "Aunt Rachel" who is a servant in her 60s who has a jovial sense of humor. Since her temperment is so jolly her owner (for lack of better term) makes the comment that she has never seen "any trouble" in her life because she has such a good humor. Then she tells the story of being raised a slave and having her husband and children sold away from her at auction. She relates how her youngest son finally found her in this story and then after telling her tale of woe, she says to her owner, "Oh no, Misto C, I hain't had no trouble. An' no joy!" I can just hear the sarcasm dripping of these final words of the story.

To sum up all of these stories is humbling for me...being white I am from the race that does not know racism the way that these people experienced it. I can only read these stories and appreciate what the African race has had to endure and how they survived it to see the day that one of them became the President of the United States. Now that is progress...slow moving...but progress never the less.

Love Poem

The first time your lips touched mine I knew you would possess me
I tasted your infinite love and my soul ascended to the stars
Beckoned back to Earth by your gentle hands
Our bodies intertwined in a sea of passion
I burned for you then from the core of my being
My heart awakened from its painful death with every caress
You healed me there on that moonlit night
My anguish set free on the wind

Calendar for American Literature II

Week 1- (1/12-1/18) Fools Crow: James Welch - Anthology of American Lit: Emily Dickinson

Week 2- (1/19-1/25) Fools Crow: James Welch - Anthology of American Lit: Emily Dickinson

Week 3- (1/26-2/1) Fools Crow: James Welch - Anthology of American Lit: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson

Week 4- (2/2-2/8) Fools Crow: James Welch – Anthology of American Lit: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson

Week 5- (2/9-2/15) African American Folktales (37-56) – Samuel Langhorne Clemens (56- 106) – Francis Ellen Watkins Harper (161) - Zora Neale Hurston (162) – Ghost Dance Song (214-217) – Kate Chopin (357-363)

Week 6-(2/16-2/22) Tracks: Louise Erdrich – Samuel Langhorne Clemens (67-106) – Alexander Lawrence Posey (217-222) – John Milton Osikson (222-228) - Henry James (279-334)

Week 7-(2/23-3/1) Tracks: Louise Erdrich – Grace King (202-208 ) - Jack London (524-526) – Standing Bear (538-540) – Charles Alexander Eastman (554-556) – Sarah Winnemucca (554-556) - Louisa May Alcott (650-665) – Out of Africa: Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)

Week 8– (3/2-3/8) Men on the Moon: Simon Ortiz – Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (566-576) - Harriet Prescott Spofford (665-667) – Constance Fenimore Woolson (675-667) – Sarah Orne Jewett (693-701) – Out of Africa: Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)

Week 9- (3/9-3/20) Men on the Moon: Simon Ortiz – Mary E. Wilkes Freeman (712-723, 758) – Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (734-744) – Sarah M.B. Piatt (751-755) – Ella Wheeler Wilcox (757) - Sophia Jewett (758-759) – E. Pauline Johnson (760-761) – Elaine Goodale Eastman (762-763) – Alice Dunbar Nelson (763-764) – Sarah Norcliff Cleghorn (765) – Gertrude Bonnen (809-819) - Edith Wharton (962-1000)

Week 10- (3/23-3/29) Men on the Moon: Simon Ortiz – Edith Wharton (1000-1028) - Booker T. Washington (868-887) – W.E.B. DuBois (894-917) – James Weldon Johnson (919-939) – Willa Cather (1034-1039) - Robert Frost (1058-1070) – Ezra Pound (1109-1131) - Gertrude Stein (1145-1156) - T.S. Eliot (1278-1306) – William Carlos Williams (1314-1315)

Week 11- (3/30-4/5) Ceremony: Leslie Marmon Silko - Langston Hughes (1248-1249, 1316-1317, 1519-1547) – Lola Ridge (1254) – Edwin Rolfe (1255-1257) – Genevieve Taggard (1261-1267) – E.E. Cummings (1268-1277) - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1324-1360) – Katherine Anne Porter (1387-1395) – Ernest Hemingway (1420-1422) – William Faulkner (1436-1464) – Alaine Locke (1490-1492) – Jean Toomer (1500-1510)

Week 12- (4/6-4/12) Ceremony: Leslie Marmon Silko – Mourning Dove (1733-1736) – John Joseph Mathews (1740-1747) – Thomas Whitecloud (1752) – Charles Reznikoff (1784-1790) – John Steinbeck (1791-1802) – Eudora Welty (1917-1919) – Tennessee Williams (1960-1962)
Week 13-(4/13-4/19) Ceremony: Leslie Marmon Silko – A Little Bit of Wisdom Horace Axtell – Arthur Miller (2051-2053) – Gwendolyn Brooks (2142-2153) – Flannery O’Conner (2216-2217) – Louise Erdrich (2995-2997) – Allen Ginsberg (2229-2240) - Jack Kerouac (2243-2245) – Gary Soto (2983-2988) – Malcom X (2273-2274) – Joy Hargo (2950-2959) – Sylvia Plath (2330-2338)

Week 14- (4/20-4/26) Smoke Signals/The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Sherman Alexie – Toni Morrison (2437-2438) – John Updike (2451-2453) – N. Scott Momaday (2479-2489) – Jimmy Santiago Baca (2658-2662) – James Welch (2680-2681) – Martin Luther King Jr (2340-2341) – Norman Mailer (2400-2401) - Sherman Alexie (3079-3081)

Week 15- (4/27-5/3) Smoke Signals/The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Sherman Alexie – Bharati Mukherjee (2693-2694) – Maxine Hong Kingston (2703-2704) – Simon Ortiz (2724-2725)

Week 16- (5/4-5/10) Smoke Signals/The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Sherman Alexie – Leslie Marmon Silko (2829-2830) – Wendy Rose (2837-2845)